Sunday, November 20, 2011

[Comic title: Wisdom of the Ancients; alt text: All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...']

This is pretty much straight up GOOMH-bait. If you are disputing that you are dumb. The weird poem-thing in the left is sufficiently bad at being a poem that I can't tell if it's actually meant to be one, or is just some unnecessary nonstandard formatting. Who knows? The second panel is vaguely amusing, as far as GOOMH-bait goes. It captures the frustration described reasonably well, and in a way which isn't too boring. But GOOMH-bait is still GOOMH-bait.

Despite his unbelievable obesity, I agree with Rob on this one, he's pandering to programmers. Often when programming you will run into an error and not know how to get around it and therefore ask the gods of the internet. Sometimes, there is already another person who had that problem, and it is frustrating when there is no post describing a fix, particularly when the post is from a long time ago, which means that you can't get a hold of them to ask them how they fixed it. It is perfect GOOMH-bait, because every programmer/wanna-be programmer has run into this and it is apparently their turn for pandering from Randall

As a non-programmer, I liked this one. In my family, I am the designated 'computer' person, and as a result I must google errors and other computer issues all the time. I think the message in this comment can be universally understood, with a spice of humor mixed in. 8/10

I sort of skimmed the stupid pseudo-poem and at first thought this was referring to a person who posted something once then dropped off the internet. I enjoyed my interpretation a lot. When I re-read it it made slightly more sense. Not a bad comic either way though.

I like the joke, but trying to figure out whether it's supposed to be a poem or not is way too distracting. If 2003 and see didn't rhyme, there'd be no question. But if he wanted to avoid that rhyme, he could have picked, say, any other year.

"I like the joke, but trying to figure out whether it's supposed to be a poem or not is way too distracting. If 2003 and see didn't rhyme, there'd be no question. But if he wanted to avoid that rhyme, he could have picked, say, any other year"

for me it's the formatting that makes me think it's poem-like. that, and the first two lines of it sound like he's trying to be poetic. but there is nothing poem-like about the rest of it. the words are quotidian, there is no meter, and I didn't notice the rhyme until you pointed it out (I read the poem on the left as separate from the second panel; now you pointed it out I can't not see it). even the cadence of it is not remotely interesting. but it seems so clear that the formatting is meant to be poem-like. it's just not clear why, because if it is a poem it is the worst poem ever written

I guess the format does suggest poetry, now that you've pointed that out. For me it's mostly the first two and last two lines that made me think this was a poem, but the weird thing is they suggest poetry in different ways. The first two lines are generically poetic. The last two lines rhyme, and I have a hard time believing that it's accidental. So it starts out as one type of poem and ends as another and in the middle is... I don't even know, the middle lacks rhythm of any sort.

I can't believe this is seriously bugging me now. What the fuck.

It's like that stupid parenthesis comic he posted to deliberately annoy the audience, except this one actually worked.

To credit bad poets, they at least make things that are recognizable as poems.

I have no idea what the fuck this is. What would you even call it?? Did he attempt poetry? Or did it end up looking like a poem in some kind of bizarre accident?

I can't even rightly label it as "rambling" because it looks as though it has some sort of structure.

As I reread it yet again I've found something else irritating: the lack of punctuation between "and there's one result / a thread by someone with the same problem". A colon would have been nice. I'd have even accepted a comma. Or, if this were really a poem, some more space suggesting it were a new stanza. It needs a break, somehow, some indication that one thought has ended and a second has begun.

it's a bad reminder of how many times anyone has ever looked up a problem on google, only to find five million results on forums of people asking the same question followed by one of the following:

1. null response (as above)2. "oh hey nevermind guys I fixed it" (always years ago so you know you will never hear from this soul again)3. "this question has already been answered, learn how to use the search function" (searching the forum will result in more threads with this response because people are dicks)

That being said, many people have pointed this shit out. Penny Arcade did especially well in taking this GOOMH and making it uniquely funny: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/05/16. Lord Randall did not, he just made another pictoblog. Stop it Randall. Stop it.

Why do you like 980? How is it supposed to be remotely interesting? I appreciate Randall's effort, but it's just a hodgepodge of random shit and how much it costs represented in graphical form. ...okay?

but instead of just giving us a big image we have the bandwidth to download and web browsers capable of displaying elegantly in this modern age, throw in a shitty javascript interface to make it goddamn unreadable

I glanced over that chart and didn't see anything in the way of humour. I don't have enough faith in Randall's grasp of economics to have any interest in that mass of information he has dumped there. Why would you buy the poster? Imagine having that up on the war in a few years time, when all that information is rendered even more inaccurate. Imagine having to explain to guests that this data was compiled by Randall munroe, a webcomic author with an old unused physics degree.

I can't understand what the fuck is going on in 980 - there is no explanation, no figure caption to say what he's showing, how he's showing it or why we should care. To me, this giant clusterfuck of information is less than useless.

It's just a pile of random money stats. And there are loads of errors ("Buri" Khalifa, the $1 per person is actually $1000 per person, etc.)

And you'd think a big sperg like Randy would know that the most valuable thing by weight is not the treskilling yellow, but antimatter. (Cue joke about Megan's milk being worth a billion dollars a droplet)

The whole thing looks pretty boring, and I can't be bothered to spend much time looking at it with that horrible interface, but what I did see rehashes two of Randall's greatest misses (951 & 854).

According to Randall, a dinner of homemade rice and pinto beans for 4 costs $41.80 (and dinner for 4 at Outback Steakhouse costs $117.96). Marion Delgado, I'd call that palpably, provably dishonest. Randall claims the ingredients in the rice and pinto beans cost $9.26. Utter bullshit, even if he's cooking a-la 854 and throwing out half the ingredients two months down the road (rice and pinto beans NEVER go bad). The bulk of the $41.80 comes from monetized opportunity cost (see 951). Leaving aside all that's wrong with assigning a cash value to time in that fashion, 2 hrs of labor at $32.52 is still bullshit. I can go to the store for ingredients, cook rice and pinto beans (canned), eat and clean the dishes in an hour. The biggest time expenditure is the trip to the store, but nobody except Randall (854) buys their ingredients one meal at a time.

Of course, if I use dry pinto beans instead of canned, it could take 2+ hours. Holy fucking Jesus fucking Christ fuck you Randall, you're fucking dumb as shit. You're counting the goddamn cooking time for the fucking pinto beans as a fucking goddamn opportunity cost. That's wrong on so many levels. Prep time for rice and pinto beans is 5 fucking minutes. The time they take to cook in the crockpot is not a fucking opportunity cost; I can do anything else I want while they cook; they require no fucking supervision.

Also, even if I accept Randall's fucking asinine assumptions about opportunity cost, the math is wrong and overly simplified. 4 people (presumably 2 adults and 2 kids) eating at Outback Steakhouse isn't a $8 opportunity cost for a half hour of driving. Both adults are spending a half hour in the car, not just one actually driving ($16). Both adults are waiting to order, eat and pay. That's another 2 hours in opportunity cost ($32). Then there's the gas to get to Outback (which should also be factored into the rice&beans grocery store run); let's say $5.

Once, I was on x reading a creepypasta. It seemed familiar in some way, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. A warning was included in the story to never repost it. I decided to repost it on another message board, just to see what would happen. I didn't really believe anything would happen.

As soon as I reposted the story, the image on my computer screen suddenly changed and I was back at x, reading a creepypasta. It seemed familiar in some way, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. A warning was included in the story to never repost it. I decided to repost it on another message board, just to see what would happen. I didn't really believe anything would happen.

As soon as I reposted the story, the image on my computer screen suddenly changed and I was back at x, reading a creepypasta. It seemed familiar in some way, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. A warning was included in the story to never repost it. I decided to repost it on another message board, just to see what would happen. I didn't really believe anything would happen.

Although, credit where it's due: I didn't see any stupid jokes shoehorned into it like there usually are with any of his giant infographics or whatever the fuck you want to call them, and I appreciate that the store lists this as "a preorder and should ship around the start of December and will include corrections". Thank fucking Christ for that, I thought he was selling this mistake-ridden piece of shit right off the bat.

That's all the positive stuff I've got to say. Glad I got that over with.

omg the picture is huge. xkcd sucks bcause the pictures so huge. i hate big pictures. they take so much time to look at. randy sucks megans nipples. pictures too big. have to read to find the jokes. pictures too big. xkcd must suck because i can't even put the effort in to criticize it anymore, therefore it sucks. big pictures. wah.

I'm sure his new wife appreciates how much time he's been spending with her... I suppose she probably didn't mind since working on the chart kept him away from her nipples. "But Meg- um I mean , Wikipedia says that you don't need a baby to lactate, I just need to suck them often enough and you'll start producing delicious milk!"

Apparently driving to Arby's costs a penny less than other places ($8.13), however according to the drawing, the travel cost is: McD $13, Arbys $9, Chilis $9, Outback $12

I was curious on his source for rice and beans costing so much to make (even ignoring the idiotic "cooking and shopping waste $30 of time that could be better spent uploading secretly taken pictures of my wife's nipples to the wikipedia article on breastmilk" claim), but his sources page is useless. It links to a CSV file that is nothing but a list of URLs - no mention of what claims each reference is meant to support. I'm not clicking through 250 links to see if there is one that mentions the cost of beans...

If anyone would like to read some of it without dealing with Randy's fucking retarded zoom bullshit, here is the whole thing scaled down to a readable level http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6849076/xkcd_money_zoom.png and the full resolution http://jp.t50.us/ss/xkcd_980.png, provided by some people on the forums.

Apparently the reason the poster is not going to be available until December is so Randall can have the forums proof-read it for free instead of doing it himself or have someone else do it. And he kind of fucked up a lot of it.

At first glance I thought he might have been teaching us about scale, like in 558. Now I'm not sure. It's not really funny (although it includes some minor joke attempts) and not at all enlightening.

This is a serious question, anybody who thinks they understand the purpose of this thing (humor or education) please tell me. And if the whole thing is supposed to be supporting a point, please tell me what it was.

He's made stuff I didn't like before, but this is the first time I don't understand what he thought was good (or worth making) about it.

And randy, every time you make a statement that pulls information from one of your references you put a (Bullshit et al 2010) or something beside it, that is a citation. If you only have a .csv file with 250 links then do not call them citations, that is a .csv file with 250 links to your sources.

Not only is 980 not funny, but it fails as an infographic. There is no consistent, logical flow to it that makes the reader's eye 'progress' within a section or from one to the next. I begin to suspect that Mr. Munroe has some inordinate obsession with making readers do all the work for him, like the pseudointellects that produce most of our so-called 'literary fiction' these days.

I had always thought that Hogwarts would be fee-free, funded either by the Ministry of Magic or by an endowment from its founders or subsequent benefactors. Even in the Muggle world, there are some state-funded boarding schools in the UK, so I don't support the automatic assumption that it is independent.

Furthermore, the source given for that figure appears to be the Daily Mail - hardly a robust foundation on which to construct such an assumption.

Randall must be the worst budgeter. I imagine his home life as an episode of I Love Lucy with the roles reversed. The episode where he goes out to buy some rice and beans and gets stuck in the supermarket for two hours is a classic.

I'm just really not sure where to stand RE: pedophilia (the sexuality, not the act). There are two relevant beliefs that I would have a hard time changing, and those are A: one does not choose one's sexuality, and it is difficult if not impossible to change one's sexuality, so therefore having a particular sexuality cannot be in and of itself immoral, B: an adult having sex with a child is wrong, because children are not capable of giving consent. The thing is, I've yet to meet someone who believes both of these things consistently. Most people seem to instantly assume that if someone is attracted to children then they're evil and will have no qualms about committing child molestation. They may be OK using the "sexuality is not a choice" argument w/r/t LGBT people but those are sexualities they don't see anything wrong with anyway. With pedophilia they start acting like it's not a choice at all. Most people I've encountered arguing position A seem to not want to acknowledge position B, and really just seem to be child molestation apologists. Now it may seem like the obvious choice is to just stick to my position even if no one else agrees with me, but it's kind of hard to know what's "reasonable" when neither side is being reasonable to me. Like, is it rude to tell someone to get psychological help if they say they're attracted to children? Having never encountered someone with this attraction who seems honestly committed to not harming children, I have no idea how effective it is, or how rude this would be. Also, with regards to drawn/animated child porn, it seem based on my beliefs above that it's not in and of itself a bad thing, but people seem to either argue that it somehow legitimizes actual childporn or that it's perfectly OK and so is porn involving actual children. Now I know the latter is wrong but I have no perspective on the former, there's really no equivalent position. The argument doesn't apply to regular porn because that doesn't appeal to a harmful sexuality. BDSM falls into this weird scenario where people either assume they're evil or act like they're only attracted to this weird ritualized roleplay and that implying that they'd actually be turned on by real rape/torture/slavery is horrible of me (even the people who think it's evil seem to take if for granted that the people who are into it wouldn't be turned on by the real thing). There just doesn't seem to be anyone who genuinely believes that someone can be turned on by something wrong and at the same time be a good person. I guess the easy thing to do would just be to agree with them, but ignoring position A up there just isn't something I'm entirely comfortable with.

The equivalent position to legitimising pedophilic urges through cartoons is watching fictional violence when you're a person predisposed to sadism, or (in a more abstract sense) decorating your house with a bottle of gin when you're an alcoholic. You're basically putting yourself at risk of one day making your urges a reality.

There's no harm in tactfully advising a person get help with something if you truly believe he or she needs it. I suggest you get help with your uncontrolled concern trolling, for instance. It's stupid.

"The equivalent position to legitimising pedophilic urges through cartoons is watching fictional violence when you're a person predisposed to sadism, or (in a more abstract sense) decorating your house with a bottle of gin when you're an alcoholic. You're basically putting yourself at risk of one day making your urges a reality."

Alternatively, you could consider it a release. Sort of like robbing banks and shooting hookers in a video game to get over your temptation to do it for real.

Anonymous I agree in the sense that it's error-riddled. I've seen other errors noted above. I didn't want to dig into it, just making a birds-eye observation.

What I meant about (it at least not being as bad as) the elaborate banana chart is, given the fact that taking in banana radioactive material pushes out an equivalent amount of bananana radioactive material, and the incoming banana stuff is no more likely to be more radioactive than what you already had than it is to be less radioactive, the usual banana dose is ZERO. And no matter how much you multiply that by, you don't get any equivalents to extra sources of radiation or radioactive material. If Randall's chart was right, taking iodine pills wouldn't shield you from any of the effects of radioactive iodine. It's the same principle. You saturate your thyroid and general system the way you're already saturated for the radioactive potassium in bananas. It makes you markedly safer if exposed to radioactive iodine. Well, your body's already set for banana radioactive potassium.

That made the whole chart a condescending, pretentious, Big Lie. And one with tremendous backing, just as the Josef Oehmen nonsense about Fukushima had.

On the other hand, the errors he made in his money chart are going to reflect badly on him immediately, and he doesn't seem to be trying to convince anyone of something.

Well, if you're not getting off sexually on fictional drawings of nudey children there really is no harm in viewing them. Their use for shock humour and what-have-you really doesn't hurt anyone at all. A drawing of Lisa Simpson sucking off Homer, for instance, is tasteless comedy but is only really harmful when viewed by a pedo.

@2:11 it doesn't seem to work that way. The research I've seen tends to point towards a trend of escalated behaviour once you start engaging smaller avenues of release. Of course, simple repression doesn't work either. Can't say I know what the solution is, I'm afraid.

Where did you learn to read, 4:40? Honestly. It's harmful for pedophiles to view because evidence suggests that satisfying their urges on a small scale will lead to an escalation of behaviour ie. they will become more comfortable with the idea of finding real children to molest.

4:46, you say that it's harmful because it leads to a harmful act. But it is far easier to simply categorise the act as harmful and the viewing of pornography as not harmful, because the former doesn't necessarily follow the latter.

I don't know what the current procedure is when child pornography is discovered in someone's possession, but I would hope it would not be a criminal procedure (assuming no children have been harmed by this particular paedophile at this point). It seems an excellent opportunity for intervention and help to protect children and the paedophile.

Because the justice system in the end should be about minimising harm. That means treatment for criminals, not revenge.

To go all the way back to 12:26, I agree with point A, I am not sure about point B. I think point B is too narrow, the point should be "an adult having sex with a child is always wrong". And I think the questions that need to be answered to be sure about B are the following.

What harms a child about molestation?Is there any kind of sexual act performed with children that doesn't harm them? Is it possible to know in the moment whether any sexual act will harm a children? Is it merely the lack of interest in sex, and that for sex to take place it MUST be forced on them that is the harmful act? Is the pain of a parent, knowing their child has engaged in sex with an adult, a cultural or biological phenomenon?

There are probably more questions that should be answered. I read Lolita last week, good book, Humbert Humbert is a sympathetic character.

"I apologize for asking this, but I honestly can't find an explanation on the site. What does GOOMH stand for?"

Get Out Of My Head. Formerly, if not currently, a common utterance on the xkcd forums. Fans of XKCD often feel (jokingly) that Randall has been spying on their thoughts or conversations, because he frequently makes comics about things that they were just thinking about or talking about.

GOOMH-bait, then, are comics which are designed to elicit this response. The emphasis is not on the humor, but on the fact that people will probably have had this experience and will sympathize. This is part of why XKCD is so deeply engrained in nerd culture: it often avoids making jokes and instead makes pandering references, hoping that people will like it because it seems to be made by someone who is Just Like You.

"I don't know what the current procedure is when child pornography is discovered in someone's possession, but I would hope it would not be a criminal procedure (assuming no children have been harmed by this particular paedophile at this point). It seems an excellent opportunity for intervention and help to protect children and the paedophile."

The standard procedure is jail time, and not a trivial amount. The demand for child pornography is at least part of the reason that it is produced (the other part being that the producer of it finds it fun maybe? I don't know what the balance between these two is) so the idea is that by being part of the demand they are essentially inflicting harm on the child

GOOMH-bait is suspect because it replaces actual humor with the hope that people will identify with the problem. it's not a joke; it's just saying 'man has anyone else ever run into this' and then people say 'YOU ARE SO BRILLIANT I HAVE DONE THIS ALSO'

it's suspect because at best it's cheap, and at worst it's outright dishonest

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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